Towns

art shows

The opening reception for the Plein Air Invitational Show will be held on Saturday, Sept. 13, from 4 to 7 p.m. in Oak Bluffs at both the Dragonfly Gallery, 91 Dukes County avenue, and at Pik Nik, 99 Dukes County avenue. The show runs through Sept. 19.

Begin with a teapot. That’s the simple underlying premise for a group exhibition at Featherstone Center for the Arts opening Saturday, Sept. 6, entitled Teapots and More.

“The main thing needs to be a teapot,” ceramacist Washington Ledesma said, explaining that each artist who offers a teapot for the exhibit may bring up to four more pieces for display. If many artists bring many pieces, Mr. Ledesma hopes the show can spill out under a tent on the Featherstone grounds.

Treehouse Studios in West Tisbury has re-opened in its new location on State Road opposite up-Island Cronig’s and will continue to feature fine art and selected antiques, as well as an assortment of art-related books.

Director Ruth Adams has announced that her new location offers expanded space within the gallery and plentiful off-street parking.

The Granary Gallery at the Red Barn welcomes all to an artists’ reception on Sunday, July 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. for new works by Alison Shaw, Scott Terry and Carol Maguire.

Alison Shaw continues to pursue her “camera as paintbrush” notion and has created a variety of new images involving color, motion and composition. She will also unveil new photographs taken in Venice, Italy.

Cheri Christensen’s No Country for Old Cows sits on a wall in Eisenhauer Gallery in Edgartown. True to the name, it’s a painting of cattle. But the artist’s use of light, a faint yellow outline around her subjects, gives the cows an aura of majesty, as if rays of the setting sun chose only to fall on them.

“Art is a way of life in many ways for the family,” Michele Ortlip says. “My generation, the generation before me, the generation before them my grandfather’s father was an artist, my great uncle, my two aunts everybody.” It goes without saying that, included in the generation before her is Michele’s father, Paul Ortlip, the shining star of the family’s serious crop of artistic talent. The fourth generation of Ortlips, under custody of their father, grew up in a Fort Lee, N.J., home overlooking the Manhattan skyline.

Elena De La Ville has just arrived home after a class at Featherstone Center for the Arts, still seemingly abuzz. You can hear the artist’s passion for teaching instantly as she describes the beeswax collage class as a complete success: “It was incredible!”

For those unfamiliar with the artistic capabilities of beeswax, she explains, “It sort of is using beeswax as glue, to be the medium for what you do, and using whatever people had to make a new piece in collage.”

It was a sensual delight and a writer’s demise, a step into a clichéd “different world.” Hypnotic trance reggae beats were clearly amplified from a Macintosh laptop computer. The transition was complete with a climate change, from the cool breeze off of Oak Bluffs’ Sunset Lake to the protected cove of Suesan Stovall’s garage. But this is not merely a garage, and this is not, in fact, a different world. It is a familiar and proximate one, only a few minutes from the main drag and harbor in Oak Bluffs.

Minutes away from the main retail drag of Circuit avenue, in the arts district of Oak Bluffs, reads a sign: “PikNik: Art & Apparel. Expect anything.” The “expect anything” line encourages visions of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain or other more radical, conceptual art pieces. In fact, PikNik is currently showing an abstract exhibit, which seems to fit “expect anything” expectations.

Caroline Hunter opens up a binder densely packed with years of newspaper clippings, decades-old photos, letters and other paper mementos. Beside her is a stack of books marked with dozens of blue Post-it notes. The meticulous bookkeeping is not a hobby. And though the man to whom these records pertain is Caroline’s late husband, Ken Williams, this scrapbook filled with Ken’s work, and articles and books mentioning him, is not a memorial: for Caroline, it is a civic responsibility.